January 18, 2012

Fancy British Library sign

I went to two libraries today. The first was the Paddington Library, the public library in our area. Overall it was a pretty small library, but well enough stocked. We were all given library cards and apparently the librarians were overjoyed to give us a tour of the library and to have us start using the library. The library was pretty busy and I'm not sure I'll use it much, but it's nice to know that I have a library around if I want one.

The King's Library.  Just one small area of one side of one story.

I also went to the fantastic British Library, which was absolutely amazing!! When you first walk in the library you see the "King's Library", which is a four story glass tower containing King George's III store of over 65,000 printed volumes of novels, pamphlets, manuscripts, and maps from his private collection.

Proof that I was there, see?

The library is the biggest library in the world in terms of items it contains. It was fantastic. I couldn’t believe how many ancient historical items it contains, including original manuscripts from Jane Austen, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Magna Carta, Beethoven, Mozart, Illuminated Manuscripts, Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”, Dickens, “Beowolf”, a Goutenburg Bible (the rarest and most expensive book in the world!), Kipling, Virginia Wolfe, and many others. It was amazing to see so many amazing historical documents in one room. I still can’t wrap my head around how old these pieces are when I look at them. You’ll look at, say, one of Jane Austen’s notebooks, and you’ll try to picture her writing in it, or try to tell yourself that that was her actual notebook she used every day. However, it is a very abstract and challenging exercise because the mind has a difficult time placing time and age. It’s hard to look at something right now and try to picture the same item back thousands of years.

Don't worry, I'll go back many many times...

After the library we checked out King’s Cross Station, and of course made a quick stop by Platform 9 ¾. All I can say is, the producers of Harry Potter made that station look a lot more impressive and striking on the big screen than it is in real life. Here I was, at the Mecca of Potterites, and it was a busy, dirty, small, unimpressive little station. Of course I had to get a picture next to the iconic trolley halfway through the barrier, but it just wasn’t the same being surrounded by other tourists and hundreds of busy, smoking, mean British people. It’s ok though; I can always watch the movies and imagine it looked like that.

After the library we went on a walk for our London Walks class that took us around a couple freaky neighborhoods (with policemen making arrests on every street corner- literally). But luckily we had each recently picked up a copy of "The Evening Post," a freakishly thick newspaper, and therefore excellent for rolling up and defending oneself with. We were fully prepared to start beating away any dodgy gang members that approached us along the way. One girl in our group mentioned that she didn’t feel safe even with all the policemen around, because the policemen don’t carry guns here. So hopefully they teach the policemen ju-jitsu or taekwondo or something so they could come to our aid if we needed it. We were completely aware that we were a group of four small white American tourists walking through a sketch-tastic area of London.

Dickens's house

One of the blue circle plaques that tells you where famous people lived

Luckily we made it out alive and un-raped. And our reward for that creepy walk was getting to see Charles Dickenson’s house, which displayed one of the blue plaques above the door (you can find these blue plaques throughout London, informing you of where famous people lived). It has been turned into a small museum and shop, but we didn’t stop in because we still wanted to get out of the area.